Kimberly Noble, MD and PhD, pediatrician and neuroscientist, has written the article, Rich Man, Poor Man: Socioeconomic Adversity and Brain Development, which is posted at the website of The Dana Foundation, a foundation run by neuroscientists. There is good stuff in the article which has a properly optimistic tone to the idea that we can help people from impoverished backgrounds by providing some sort of enrichment for the environments in which their children develop. I would even add that I think brain plasticity indicates some possibility of helping the likes of adults in the early stages of dementia or those recovering from some sort of brain injury or those who have given themselves an impoverished life-style (couch-potato or failure to develop job-skills or whatever).
But the article is confusing because there’s no clear understanding proposed for human nature, even a conventional theory of nature and nurture isn’t put forth. The article is written as if we can significantly raise the achievement level of children living in perhaps barren cultural conditions even as they remain in cultures which, for example, have little or no respect for books or learning. This is not to say that illiterate parents can’t nurture a respect for learning in their children. I’ve read that a number of Chinese immigrants to the United States in the 20th century were themselves illiterate but taught their children respect for learning and would even keep the children’s chores light so they could study or read or practice music. The article also doesn’t even mention genes or epigenetic effects. Like it or not, families of adults with talents for abstract thinking tend to produce children with similar talents. There has also been some strong evidence that a child’s metabolism is shaped partly by the habits, good or bad, of not only mothers but even maternal grandmothers. Wildlife biologists have even speculated that grizzly bear mothers, responding to their own situation, send signals to their sons in particular causing them to grow big, even by grizzly standards, if the species is dominant and the males will be able to eat plentifully of meat or to stay relatively small if there is a dangerous competitor such as white men—the native Americans of the Rockies and California weren’t much of a challenge for big, predatory bears. Is it possible that children, especially boys, have slightly different personality characteristics depending upon their mother’s environment—big and aggressive in a violent setting or perhaps smaller and more sociable in a peaceful setting?
Dr Noble doesn’t say anything unreasonable. Some might wish to leave out hard truths to encourage optimism, but reality tends to bite, if only eventually, especially when true reforms require hardheaded perseverance over a lifetime or even over multiple generations—a situation likely to prevail when we deal with the characteristics of truly civilized human beings whose achievements are dependent upon at least some abstract reasoning skills as well as a large body of knowledge and customs.
The short Editor’s Note, or introduction, of the article, Rich Man, Poor Man: Socioeconomic Adversity and Brain Development. is:
Here’s a disturbing statistic that made headlines this past January: The richest 85 people in the world now hold as much wealth as the poorest half. Keeping in mind the goal of closing the ever-widening gap between the haves and the have-nots, our author examines new research that ties family income level and other factors to brain development. While socioeconomic adversity may not solely determine a child’s success later in life, its significant role in helping children develop language, memory, and life skills can no longer be ignored.
Children can’t learn well, if at all, if they are hungry and cold, but they are also not likely to learn well if they don’t wish to do so, if they don’t have the ambition to read books or at least to satisfy parents or other relatives or community leaders who value learning. Are there also children who haven’t the ability to read well or to think abstractly, even with dedicated teachers who have good resources at their disposal? Are those children likely to come from family lines of human beings with similar lack of ability? A difficult question which is silently avoided in this article and perhaps to good purpose, but part of my mission is to reach a better understanding of human being and I can’t ignore the entire bundle of often inconvenient questions connected to developing that understanding.
There are certainly some skills necessary to success in education which can be nurtured to at least some extent. Modern men, and their corporations and governments have acted as if determined to destroy one particular ability before it shows as a developed skill. This is one which has been discussed often. Our entertainment systems, general life-styles, and even some of our educational programs act to retard or even destroy the ability to concentrate beginning with the simple self-discipline to sit still while learning. This is a tricky matter because, as one complicating example, I knew plenty of young men who, as teenagers, had trouble sitting still in the classroom or concentrating on history or biology but could work intensely for hours figuring out how a car engine worked or how to make a proper joint on a piece of furniture.
There is little evidence that Americans in general are much interested in high achievement outside of sports or the acquisition of wealth and most have retreated to the couch in front of the television by their 20s, out of shape and reconciled to a very modest prosperity.
What does this mean? Can we blame the residents of for-ever impoverished regions of the earth for lack of moral order or for not delaying satisfaction or something of the sort? The sad fact that so many middle-class Americans of all ethnic groups seem to willingly travel a downward spiral into inner-city culture or the like certainly tells us that we have the freedom to damage our moral character. Until recently, it looked as if Americans would remain prosperous indefinitely. Somehow, we’ve created a society in which the children from those modestly prosperous households, having attended school systems rich in physical resources, are looking at relatively bleak futures. At best, we seem to be a people whose prosperity, however modest, is dependent upon some corporation or high-achieving individual giving us a chance in life; we don’t seem to have the inner resources to make it on our own. That’s a bad way to express matters and the actual situation is quite complex but I’ll discuss some of the issues contributing to the complexity.
Do we, as individuals or even as members of `nuclear families’ have much freedom to move from disordered environments toward a state of greater moral order which, in the modern West, has usually brought greater material prosperity as well? It’s easier to travel to the `larger’ regions of disorder in most state-spaces which are likely to correspond to human social systems, which is to say that it takes a number of generations to build a civilization or a culture but only a small number of years to destroy it. I’m always tempted to expound upon these issues but I’ll limit myself in this essay to recommending the reader explore my website, Acts of Being, and download books or essays discussing the multitude of issues related to the nature of created being, human being, and civilization. As a start, an interested reader can download A More Exact Understanding of Human Being for a summary of my understanding of human being in the concrete and the abstract, the individual and the communal.
The article. Rich Man, Poor Man: Socioeconomic Adversity and Brain Development, speaks truths in a way that can be misleading as it deals with human beings as if mostly freestanding individuals though there is recognition of the mother-child relationship, but that has been accepted by nearly all exponents of radical individualism—it’s apparently something we can outgrow to become healthy freestanding individuals. It would also seem, from the presentation and perhaps from the assumptions shaping the research protocols, that inheritance plays little or no role in shaping the mental development and consequently mature capabilities of a human being. It is comforting to modern men to take each child as a fresh start of sorts and often dispiriting to realize that child is a member of specific human communities including a (genetic) family-line.
Biology, narrowly conceived, isn’t the only problem. Some cultures don’t value human development as Greeks and Jews and Chinese do and as, once upon a time, modern European men did. Some cultures and family-lines might well be made up of human beings with limited capacity for higher learning. Still, all human cultures are rich and complex in some significant sense and all human beings have something to offer their human communities. It’s probably best that educators and the researchers and others who support them be optimistic but perhaps intense disappointment should be avoided by prudent constraints on the hopes that a child can be `raised’ from the low achievements of her parents and other adults in her culture—we should at least be aware that any noticeable improvements (of a lasting sort) might occur only after a few generations of effort. We modern men aren’t good with this business of gradual change. As the economist Thomas Sowell, himself a high-achieving African-American, has noted: it’s not just coincidence that Jews recover so quickly after periods of the most intense adversity—Jews, as a people, have been literate for thousands of years. Yet, we modern Americans expect rapid improvements within a year or two of the adoption of a new fad in educational technology. And some have managed to find statistics indicating such improvements were occurring even as the situations of at least inner-city African-Americans, and other groups, have gone from bad to catastrophically bad.
Dr Noble points to one factor, experience with language, which is surely important, but it should be seen in the complete setting I’ve recommended, the setting few have: an understanding of being and of human being, communal and individual. That includes all that pessimistic stuff about the genetic limitations of all human beings, limitations acceptable when I can’t run fast enough to make the Olympics or sing well enough to ever be the soloist in even a small church community but not so acceptable when some children can’t learn mathematics, others can’t read complex novels or history books, others can’t acquire the practical skills necessary for business success, and some can’t seem to learn much of anything in particular. Again, I’ve developed a reasonably complete Christian understanding of Creation and of human being and it can be found in the various writings at my website, Acts of Being.
Dr Noble’s article speaks of experience with language in these terms:
In a recent study in our lab, we examined brain volumes in a group of 60 socioeconomically diverse children ranging from 5 to 17 years of age. We found that, as children get older, higher SES children tend to dedicate relatively more neural real estate to areas of the brain that support language development, in comparison to their lower SES peers. This suggested to us that something about the experience of growing up in a higher SES environment likely leads to a greater investment in language-related regions of the brain.
Indeed, this something is almost certainly experience with language itself. It is well established that children from disadvantaged homes tend to hear fewer words—an estimated 30 million fewer words by age three than their higher-SES counterparts, to be precise. Lower-SES mothers are also more likely to speak to their children in a directive rather than conversational manner, and to use less complex speech patterns and fewer gestures. It is likely that differences in maternal speech input result in a cascade of effects that are directly relevant for the development of a child’s language-supporting cortex during infancy. Much as greater exposure to music may increase an individual’s perception of speech years later, greater social engagement with interactive adults may lead children to have improved abilities to perceive and discriminate among speech sounds. Thus, one mechanistic pathway would suggest that socioeconomic disparities result in large differences in quality and quantity of linguistic exposure, which in turn lead to differences in the development of language-supporting brain regions—and, finally, to the often-reported SES disparities in children’s language skills. [See original article for footnotes.]
This is good to know, but is consistent with all of my criticisms above. Some language impoverishment problems might be due to genetic issues, including epigenetic effects which can only be dealt with over generations. If so, the children having less ability to use language in rich and complex ways won’t have lasting benefit from being placed in an environment in which others use language in such ways. In fact, the result might be frustration and resentment.
Some language impoverishment problems might be due to cultural impoverishment which also can only be dealt with over generations. Thomas Sowell, the economist mentioned above, didn’t explicitly justify his cautious optimism (at least in any of his books I’ve read) that great improvements are possible for the development of minds in African-Americans but seems to feel it’s at least quite possible that the current impoverished state of the `African-American mind’ is due to some problems of an epigenetic and cultural nature, but he knows well that African-Americans, even under optimistic assumptions of long-range potential, aren’t about to catch up anytime soon to Jewish-Americans or Chinese-Americans in fields such as physics or philosophy or medical research.
Do we modern Americans or other modern men have the stamina to stay the course and help children of low-achievement and from low-achievement cultures to advance at least somewhat? Do we have the truer love and tolerance to accept it when some children and some cultures don’t prove able to reach the achievements of, say, the Americans of Ashkenazi Jewish descent? Are we capable of building societies which offer rich and dignified lives to all?